


My Heart, My Soul

by Rimaina



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Other, Self-Reflection, Underage Masturbation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 22:02:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14530161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rimaina/pseuds/Rimaina
Summary: Love, the idea of romance had flitted your mind once before. You’ve read material from various sources that you had an inkling of what it is. If you’ve felt it before is another issue on its own.





	My Heart, My Soul

The sun was shining from your open window and onto your desk. It’s a tropical summer’s day, you’re sticky with sweat and your exposed skin was sticking to the plastic parts of the chair. The metal fan was set to the highest setting it has, whirring loudly and pointed on your back. You might get sick if your sweat dries on your back, -you don’t recall where you got this information. Your hand hovers the drawing tablet, you have no theme in mind, you were bored and there was nothing to do.

You absentmindedly draw a sword on your tablet, make it sharp and not shitty. You stare at your screen through your shades, not really staring at one thing on it, you stare at the whole screen, even the edges. You sigh and massage your nose, moving your shades up in the process. You have to do something. Anything else than sit around and draw on a virtual screen. Something physical but you didn’t feel like sparring with your robots today, not at this time at least.

You stand up and stretch your body, feeling your muscles tense from sitting on a chair for a couple of hours. You tap the power button of your screen to turn it off. You put your shades up and look around your room. It looks a bit messy, and you’re so bored that maybe you’ll clean it up a little. You head to your pile of hats, smuppets, and machine parts. You sort through them, pile the baseball caps on top of each other, effectively reducing the space they occupy.

The multitude of colorful smuppets that you sew was thrown on the bed, you’ll deal with those plush asses later. What’s left are spare parts and wires from your earlier projects. You don’t have a place to put them inside your room, you didn’t think about having a storage space for them, you just threw them into the puppet and hats pile due to its convenience.

What’s something that you can draw this time? Maybe a movie would give you some inspiration but that would mean standing up from your chair again after you’ve just sat down and getting some old DVDs from who knows where in your room. You had movies saved on your computer that you’ve already watched a million times by now. A sigh escapes your mouth, there’s just nothing to do, no inspiration, no motivation.

Drawing was something that helps you express your thoughts. Words can’t cut all of what you want to impart to your friends. Yeah chatting with your friends was nice and all, however, Pesterchum was limited to just text chats and sending images. Calls and video calls could only be done with Roxy. You weren’t really sure what kind of program allows you to send text messages to the past but not audio or video calls. Yet somehow images and gifs work. Well, links to the images work, it doesn’t show a preview in the chat.

Your drawings were made for your friends, for their eyes and yours. What else could there be when you decide to create some piece of media that can be seen by few people that you know? Self-accomplishment? You feel that a lot already, there must be something else out there.

Is there?

The sun’s rays that were once golden was now drowning your vision with sepia tones. You put your anime shades over your head, the harsh light not hurting your sensitive eyes anymore. This feels a tad melancholic having not accomplished anything during the whole day. Blanking out the past few days were a norm for you for a while now.

Tiredness was creeping on your mind despite not really doing anything for the whole day. This passiveness slightly scares you. You felt like you had to do something at least, something remotely productive. Anything that will get your brain to work. The sky was turning pinkish outside, your lights automatically turn on when a sensor triggers itself the moment that your room was at a certain light level.

You grab your pen with your left and tap your screen button with your right, the light flashing bright light on your pupils before adjusting to a dimmer setting. You’re really proud of your little upgrades on your devices, it makes things easier. A lot easier really. Now that you’ve thought about it, maybe automating the majority of the things in your room has made your life a bit dull, overall efficient but dull.

Micromanaging some of the chores is actually better if you wanted to get your body moving. It’s not like you’ve been doing a lot aside from diving, fishing, tinkering, and using your computer. That’s honestly not a lot but what can a 16-year-old guy do in a post-apocalyptic world? At the very least you have friends who would chat with you.

Oh, who were you kidding? You’re a touch starved fuck who would very much like to hug your friends at one point in time and not just in the dream world. You’ve dragged Roxy from sleepwalking, sleep-flying out beyond Derse whenever you see her floating dangerously to the edge of your moon. You would very much like to offer a kiss on their cheeks in a totally platonic and affectionate way. There is no way it will have a different intention aside from that.

God, what is up with the sudden rush of feelings?

That gave you a light bulb moment. By now the temperature around your surroundings start going down, you flick your fan’s switch to a medium wind speed. The chair creaks under you as you straighten your back and stretch your arms once again. An idea in your head, hands ready for some action.

Love, the idea of romance had flitted your mind once before. You’ve read material from various sources that you had an inkling of what it is. If you’ve felt it before is another issue on its own. Honestly speaking you’ve never thought about it anything other than another emotion that almost everyone experiences at some point in their life, the romance kind anyway. You’ve felt platonic love from and towards your buddies.

There are several kinds of love, you’d like to think. Hands type away a question you’ve been asking yourself several times, “What is love?”. The browser goes blank for a few seconds, the little icon that moves when the page is processing is rolling away for a while. You live in the future but your internet is shit. It’s not exactly much of the internet that your Bro probably knows.

The internet used to connect people, now it’s just an archive of the old world with no new content to be published. In a weird time loop, the content you make gets archived into the past for Jane and Jake to see. Technically all your chats have already been logged in the archives, it just waits for you to trigger it.

In a sense, you’ve asserted yourself in the past despite being in the future. Your heart aches with those thoughts, your hands clutch the left part of your chest, the area where your heart is supposed to be. You’ve missed a lot, you’ve missed what you’ve done. What you never did is done.

The results load onto your screen, your connection finally accessing the old archives that good old Google can access. Lyrics upon lyrics of songs that were once popular fill the first page. This wasn’t what you wanted. Your hands massage the bridge of your nose.

Maybe you should be more specific in your query. It’s barely evening and you’re already feeling sleepy. You don’t recall eating at all this day, time felt fast despite having a slow day. You don’t know how to describe it. Thinking about what to add yields no results. Water. You need water, you’re probably dehydrated as fuck.

You had installed a very inconspicuous water filter at the back of your apartment as if your humble abode isn’t already sticking out like a sore thumb in the middle of a vast ocean. A cup was sitting next to a makeshift sink outside and you fill that with filtered water.

The first few gulps of warm water shocked your insides. The acid of your stomach didn’t take too well when water was introduced into your system. Gut-wrenching pain wracked your abdomen and this is probably the worst internal pain you’ve ever felt. You fight the urge to retch the water you just drank. Tears were coming out of the corners of your eyes.

You didn’t know better. You are learning this the hard way. This is further proof of the sad fact that no one raised you in this godforsaken planet, no one to remind you to stay hydrated nor tell you about the effects of not having anything in your stomach for a while.

Sure, you’ve had days where you didn’t eat properly and you had mild stomach aches that remind you that eating was a thing. But recently you’ve gotten more and more apathetic, barely realizing that you had other basic needs aside from bathing every day. You didn’t have to bathe every day but the sticky humid feel of living over an ocean was a gross thought.

 

Birds were flying outside your window. When there are birds, there is land somewhere on this planet. They’re alive, they are free, they’re your friends, and maybe sometimes your food. They move in flocks, flying where they please. You envy those birds so much. They have the freedom, having not a care in the world. They stay with others of the same species, they move without worrying about some alien pursuers trying to hunt them.

What you’re really trying to get here is that you’re just a caged bird, the cage being planet Earth. The moon’s rays trickle down your window, its reflection on the surface of the ocean underneath your apartment. You recall watching a show where the main character wanted to catch the moon when he was younger. Poor naive main character, you can’t catch the moon, it’s physically impossible.

You raise your hand towards the ocean, cupping the outline of the moon. Just for a moment, you’d like to think that impossible things can happen. This moon is the same one that your friends have seen all their lives, the same one that lights their nights. This is the same planet they consider home. You close your eyes and take a lungful of ocean air and imagine the times they have breathed the same thing.

But then, it’s in the past. Time was the biggest barrier you’ve had with your other two pals. They live in the past, you have to live in their future. Have they thought about the things you’ve thought about? They had other people, other species to interact with. They may be limited to the way how their social and physical barriers keep them at their place in their era.

Their era. Man, they’re old. A low chuckle erupts from your chest, it was hilarious really, to think they’re old despite you interact with them when you’re all at the same age. A thought comes around your head. If you didn’t have all of these things that allow you to essentially go back in time, to interact with other people, to know that there is another living human in this planet, what would happen to you?

Loneliness is certainly something. Before you knew it, you’re crying. Behind the screen, no one would know if you were crying. Outside of chats and telling them you’re okay, they don’t really see what is going on. You feel very selfish with your thoughts. You don’t know what they feel about what’s happening in their lives, your one-sided thoughts and comments on their lives are unfair to them.

But who cares, they won’t know, they won’t see, they don’t need to know all of that. You are alone with your own thoughts and feelings. They had their own things to worry about, you telling them about your own burdens would be selfish of you, you think.

It’s nice to be left alone with your own thoughts sometimes. Times like these really make you think about the things that make your life feel like it has meaning, however, it’s a double-edged sword in which you are also left with all the negative things that have come with it. Some time ago, somewhere on this planet, they’d probably had thoughts like these.

The commonalities of your lives are what bind you guys together. It’s so much more than this game you guys are about to play. But the game has already started didn’t it? That’s why you are able to do all these things. That’s why your Bro was aware of your fate. Why he himself had resigned to the game’s mechanics.

You’ve been alone with your thoughts for the whole day. Again. 16 years of living alone can be really mentally taxing. Theoretically speaking you can go and visit Roxy whenever you want, wherever she may be. You had your rocket board anyway, but maybe not today. You are tired and you just want to go shower then go to bed.

Simple things, little activities that should be done every day. You should add eating three times a day to that list of activities, maybe another alarm to be set. The AR gave you the whole day to yourself, he’s been quiet the whole time which makes you glad. You didn't need your 13-year-old self-echoing your thoughts.

You’ve let your body go into auto mode. You showered, cooked and ate some fish storing in the cooler outside the main area of your house. The cooler also houses a few cans of orange soda that your bro left for you. You read that in a few articles and even saw in a few videos, that soda supposedly is carbonated. You really don’t know how a carbonated drink feels, or maybe you do? Orange soda is orange soda. Whenever Jane mentions her throat feeling a little burn when drinking soda, you get curious. You don’t feel a burn feel, it’s rather smooth on your throat, a little sticky even.

Okay, you’re going back to that reflection thing you were doing the whole day and you need to stop. The bed was still housing your plush asses and unmade sheets. They fly into the air as you throw yourself on that piece of furniture. Your hands grab the thin sheets on your bed, fisting them before holding them to your chest. Covering yourself up will only make you feel hotter because it’s still pretty hot inside your room despite having an industrial fan pointed at your body. You wanted to hold something and the thin fabric would do.

You stir and face the ceiling above you. The reflection of the moonlight dance across your ceiling, the glinting of some of the metallic surfaces in your room giving a wave effect. It’s like staring at a white ocean, slow and comforting. The computer was left to hibernate when you left it to get water hours ago, the browser still housing that one question you wanted to know the answer to. Now knowing what love is going to haunt your mind.


End file.
